Safe layout size vs screen resolution

[muzz]

I want to put together a basic runtime for a group of friends who have a mixture of Mac and Windows. I have decided to work on a screen resolution of 800x600 at the moment but I'm not sure how that reflects in terms of layout size, given that there are the dimensions of the menu bar, status bar, borders, scroll bars etc to take into account.

Can someone give me an idea of what layout dimensions I should aim for to avoid "overflow" problems on either Mac or Windows? The development will be on a Mac.

Cheers, Muzz

[IdealData]

If you go with Verdana as your font there shouldn't be much of a problem. In past I used Helvetica, but I always place a "hard space" (alt-space) at the end of text for on-screen or print as this allows just enough space for Windows to expand into Arial.

Don't forget to use fixed margins on reports as you probably can't predict the capabilitie of the printers. Dims - TOP/12mm, LEFT/12mm, RIGHT/12mm, BOTTOM/15mm - I haven't seen a printer that can't print within these boundaries.

[muzz]

Thanks for that input IdealData.

At the moment I really want to find out what the total dimensions of the layout should be. For instance if I were to have just a body, would I make the dimensions say 750x550 to correctly fit a 800x600 screen taking into acount the width of the status area, scroll bars etc, or should I make it larger or smaller. I don't want users to have to scroll past the edges.

Thanks, Muzz

[Fenton]

There is a program named SmallScreenX that lets you create a box of whatever size, which sits on top of your apps. It's kind of fiddly to set up a size, then save it; but it works (in the old pre-OS X version it had several presets). It will be a little tricky to get something that works well cross-platform, because of things like the Start Menu on Windows, and the Dock on Mac. Also zooming causes an extra menu bar on Windows (restore mode). But you can get close, then test. 800x600 sure is small. I would think that 1024x768 is the new standard minimum.

[comment]

Didn't you get Art Directors Toolkit bundled with OSX? It has a on-screen ruler that allows you to measure anything.

I played with this rather extensively back in v.4, and I recall I needed 4 layout sizes for each scren size:

- Form layout with status area

- Form layout w/o status area

- List layout with status area

- List layout w/o status area

There was a 3 pixel difference in width between List and Form, due to the black bar indicating the current record in List.

[Lee Smith]

Hi Comment,

Didn't you get Art Directors Toolkit bundled with OSX?

Never heard of it, and a search of my HD did not return anything?

Lee

[comment]

Perhaps it needs to be installed as an extra? (I really don't remember.) Take a look at your installation CD/DVD.